Amanda Babington is a baroque violinist and recorder player. She is a visiting performance fellow at the University of Aberdeen, directs the baroque orchestra at the University of Manchester, is an academic lecturer at the Royal Northern College of Music and has published articles on Handel and Charles Jennens.

As is now generally agreed, so-called ‘authentic’ performances of baroque music are modern in conception and sound. The point was argued convincingly during the 1980s by Laurence Dreyfus, Richard Taruskin and others (Dreyfus, ‘Early Music Defended against Its Devotees: A Theory of Historical Performance in the Twentieth Century’, The Musical Quarterly 69/3 (1983), 297–322; Taruskin, Daniel Leech-Wilkinson, Nicholas Temperley and Robert Winter, ‘The Limits of Authenticity: A Discussion’, Early Music 12/1 (1984), 3–25; Nicholas Kenyon, ed., Authenticity and Early Music: A Symposium (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1988)). Radically separated from nineteenth-century performance traditions, the reconstructed ‘old’ sound was exciting and new, and, for me at least, there have been occasions when these ‘authentic’ performances have been revelatory, shedding light on music I thought I knew (although, to be fully confessional in terms of the era in which it all began, I also loved the Swingle Singers and Wendy (Walter) Carlos's Switched-On Bach).

Pietro Metastasio's two librettos featuring ostensibly Chinese subject matter, Le cinesi (1735, revised 1749) and L'eroe cinese (1752), came into being during a period of crisis in the Holy Roman Empire, as the reigning Habsburg dynasty confronted a war of succession motivated by resistance to the Empress Maria Theresia's accession to the throne. This article investigates how Austria envisioned China and how this was used to voice notions of rightful political legitimacy at a time of grave threat to the continuance of a long-standing ruling house. It argues that idealized traits of the Chinese other such as loyalty, deference and wisdom furnished the basis for a reflexive critique that helped to bolster and renew a native imperial self. This stance of ‘dialogic monologism’ towards a foreign culture emerges in a detailed examination of the textual style of the two librettos, the musical characteristics of the settings performed in or near Vienna around the middle of the eighteenth century and the conditions of sponsorship of these performances.

In contrast to what its title suggests, Niccolò Jommelli's Cajo Mario (Rome, 1746) has little to do with the consul Caius Marius (157–86 BC). Instead, the opera transposes the myth of Iphigenia in Aulis to the Roman Republic, having Marius, his daughter, her lover and her villainous suitor assume the roles of Agamemnon, Iphigenia, Achilles and Ajax respectively. Thus configured, Jommelli's opera held the stage until 1772, enjoying fifteen revivals with most of the original music intact – a record in the composer's oeuvre. This essay seeks to clarify the reasons for that remarkable success. By juxtaposing Jommelli's score and Gaetano Roccaforte's libretto with a set of six paintings by the contemporary artist Antonio Joli (c1700–1777), it aims to show how Cajo Mario shares compositional strategies with a connoisseur's genre in the fine arts: the capriccio. In keeping with Joli's capricci, which all deploy the same structural motif, Cajo Mario incorporates a narrative structure through which the ‘parallel universe’ of related works imposes itself on the opera's setting and action, making spectators wonder – as a character does in the course of the opera – whether they are gazing at an event from republican Rome or reliving a legend from ancient Greece.

In 1701–1702 writer and poet Peter Anthony Motteux collaborated with composer John Eccles, Master of the King's Musick, in writing the ode for King William III's birthday. Eccles's autograph manuscript is listed in the British Library manuscript catalogue as ‘Ode for the King's Birthday, 1703; in score by John Eccles’ and is accompanied by a claim that the ode had already reached folio 10v when William died, requiring the words to be amended to suit his successor, Queen Anne. A closer inspection of this manuscript reveals that much more of the ode had been completed before the king's death, and that much more than the words ‘king’ and ‘William’ was amended to suit a succeeding monarch of a different gender and nationality. The work was performed before Queen Anne on her birthday in 1703 and the words were published shortly afterwards. Discrepancies between the printed text and that in Eccles's score indicate that no fewer than three versions of the text were devised during the creative process. These versions raise issues of authority with respect to poet and composer. A careful analysis of the manuscript's paper types and rastrology reveals a collaborative process of re-engineering that was, in fact, applied to an already completed work. This article explores the problems of textual versus musical authority embodied in the ode and the difficulties faced by its creators in reworking a piece originally celebrating a foreign male war-hero for a female British queen during a period of political and religious fragility.

In the course of the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, composers and music theorists moved away from the system of the eight ecclesiastical modes that had been elaborated by medieval theorists and was later applied to polyphonic music (including the varied system extended to twelve modes in the sixteenth century) towards modern bimodal tonality. Although several modal systems coexisted within this time period, a distinct variant of the eight modes, often known in modern scholarship as the church keys, developed as a practical solution to problems associated with the performance of psalms and other recited formulas (especially the Magnificat) in alternatim practice between the choir in plainchant and the organ. A scarcity of research on this topic within investigations of Spanish music prompts us to outline an introduction to a matter so crucial to music theory of the baroque period in Spain. Thus we present an overview of the treatment of the church keys or tones in Spanish treatises over a long period of two centuries, and focus briefly on particular contributions made by individual authors.

Marie-Justine-Benoîte Duronceray was an extraordinary, multi-talented artist, described by Bruce Alan Brown as a singer, actor, dancer and dramatist. Her performances on the Paris stage between 1745 and 1771 met with general enthusiasm, and her pioneering of realistic stage costume was influential. Her mastery of the modern Italian aria, linked with Italianate acting style, was crucial to the development of modern opéra comique. Biographers and others have recounted her life, creatively linked with that of her husband, the dramatist Charles-Simon Favart, and images, sometimes capturing a role that she played, have been reproduced; a sculpted likeness can be found in the Louvre. Figure 1 celebrates Marie-Justine in 1753, an eventful year during which she even appeared at Fontainebleau opposite Marie Fel and Pierre Jélyotte, in La Coquette trompée (with music by Antoine Dauvergne and text by C.-S.